Abstract
This study investigates the heterogeneous long-term effects of compulsory education on property crime by exploiting the staggered implementation of China’s Compulsory Schooling Law (CSL) as a natural experiment. Using a novel panel dataset of criminal court verdicts from the China Judgments Online platform, we find that CSL significantly increased educational attainment and reduced property crime rates in affected cohorts. This reduction is concentrated in low-skill theft crimes, with no significant effect on high-skill fraud crimes, suggesting that basic education primarily deters entry-level criminal activity. These results suggest that displacement effects may play a role, highlighting the importance of considering the differential reach of education policies, such as basic compulsory schooling versus higher education expansions, when designing crime prevention strategies.
| Original language | English |
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| Journal | Journal of Comparative Economics |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 16 Nov 2025 |
Bibliographical note
We thank the editor, Hongbin Li, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments that greatly improved the paper. We are also grateful to participants at the 2024 China Economic Society (CES) Annual Conference for helpful suggestions. We owe special thanks to Cheng Chen, Shiko Maruyama, Zhaoguang Wang, and Yanfang Su for insightful feedback and support. The authors are listed alphabetically and contributed equally to this work.Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Association for Comparative Economic Studies.
Funding
Bai was supported by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (No. 23K12459); Li was supported by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (No. 23K12461); Tanaka was supported by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 20H05629). All errors are our own.
Keywords
- Compulsory schooling laws
- Education
- Crime
- Court documents
- China
